How to electroplate silver in home?

[newone2010]

I am in Chongqing Province,China.As you know,China is just a whole large factory and construction site. It’s too difficult to find a electroplating factory or studio to help me because of the little number of my plates.Finally,I found a man who can electroplate silver for me,but get unsatisfactory results.

I got some info from: http://www.dagsargentinos.com.ar and I think I can do electroplating myself if I get some help.

Is there anybody can let me know the detailed info of electroplating silver?

Thank you all.

best,

Li Junyi

[Andy Stockton]

http://forum.caswellplating.com/electroplating-questions/

[newone2010]

Thank you so much,Andy

[Bakody]

I looked around on the internet, on the forum as well (what was mentioned above) and I didn’t get clear answer for my questions:

If you are making electroplating at home, what kind of formula/recipe are you using?

How do you handle cyanide based bath? How I need to protect myself from it?

or just a silver nitrate and potassium cyanide bath is enough?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Andy Stockton]

Hi Bakody – The plating process shown on the Caswell’s site is non-cyanide based. There is also plating equipment for sale on the Rio Grande Site – http://www.riogrande.com.

I am not actually plating at home, so I can’t answer your questions about formula/recipe but the information you need is on that site. Caswell’s sells an online plating guide that is useful.

I don’t personally recommend cyanide based plating because of the toxicity of the process and the difficulty of disposing of waste.

[jgmotamedi]

I have the Caswell chemicals, and have had slight success with them. After many hours of effort I finally started getting acceptable plates, but not as good as commercially plated ones. I never managed to get the same polish on my home-brew plates. Regardless of how well I polished the base metal (both copper and brass) my plates were pretty rough when they came out of the bath. While their chemicals may be good, Caswell did not provide me with good support, and their forum is pretty useless.

Cyanide baths are available for purchase through Shor in the US, and other places. Going through old plating manuals (Google books) will provide some guidance on how to create your own silver cyanide bath from sodium or potassium cyanide and silver oxide, but the process seemed very complex (especially starting from silver nitrate) and extremely dangerous.

Plating is an art form as complex as making daguerreotypes. I decided to put the chemicals down for the moment and spend my limited free time making images, not plates. But of course, if you can’t get plates, you have to make them…

[Bakody]

I don’t want to order ready made chemicals because of the price and the cost of the shipping, so I’m still searching for cyanide free silver plating solutions, silver electroplating. I found some publications in the topic, this is the most promising:
http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/18/17422.pdf

http://metalfinishing.epubxp.com/i/49721/244

Both of them using about the same amount of:

silver chloride 30-50g/l
sodium thiosulphate 500g/l
sodium or potassium metabisulphate 30g/l
for pH: sodium bisulphte or hydroxide
0,5A/dm2

The only problem with this is the poor adhesion between copper and silver, so need to do pretreatment, like use silver strike or for a few min in ammonium thiocyanate. Ammonium thiocyanate will produce on the polished copper plate: copper thiocyanate.
When I create copper thiocyanate on the copper surface or/and If accidently I don’t wash it down properly and I put it in to the sodium thiosulphate solution, can cyanide gas produce?
Is any other oxidizer will be fine or need to have copper thiocyanate on the plate for good adhesion? What do think about Nitric acid as a pretreatment?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Bakody]

Finally I found this Mike Robinson thiosulphate based silver plating http://www.cdags.org/forums/topic/could-someone-tell-me-how-to-galvanize-a-sterling-sheet/ It’s not useful for pure copper plates, need a pretreatment or something like that.
He talked about a KI based formula. I already read read about this in an old book. This is a working formula, but after silver plating, before polishing the silver surface will be matte and a little bit yellow. And after polishing is it sill yellow? How much? How good is the adhesion? Or if it’s too yellow use this as a pretreatment and then use the thiosulphate based formula?!
I hope Mike you can read this, I’m interest, whats your experience with this KI formula!

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Bakody]

(I just submitted this writing and disappeared, strange, so again:)
I just found again Mike Robinson thiosulphate based formula. No adhesion between copper and silver. http://www.cdags.org/forums/topic/could-someone-tell-me-how-to-galvanize-a-sterling-sheet/  But he was talking about a KI based formula. I already read about this in an old book, but in the book they wrote, that after silver plating, but before polishing, the surface will be  a little bit yellow. Mike, if you can read this: How yellow will be and after polishing is it looks better, yellow tone will disappear? Can you tell me more about this? In the book they used KI and AgCl. How good is the adhesion in this case? Or if it’s too yellow, use this as a pretreatment and then silver plate with thiosulphate based formula?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Bakody]

(I just submitted 2 times this writing and disappeared, strange, so again:)

I just found again Mike Robinson thiosulphate based formula. No adhesion between copper and silver. http://www.cdags.org/forums/topic/could-someone-tell-me-how-to-galvanize-a-sterling-sheet/ But he was talking about a KI based formula. I already read about this in an old book, but in the book they wrote, that after silver plating and before polishing, the surface will be a little bit yellow.

Mike, if you can read this: How yellow will be and after polishing is it looks better, yellow tone will disappear? Can you tell me more about this? In the book they used KI and AgCl. How good is the adhesion in this case? Or if it’s too yellow, use this as a pretreatment and then silver plate with thiosulphate based formula?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Bakody]

Mike,
(if you can read this one day…)
Did you use KI AgCl or KI AgI silver plating bath? I found just KI AgI based formulas with calcium nitrate? Is it the one what you used? How yellow will be the silver after polishing? Is it has any affect on the final image (tone)?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Mike Robinson]

Dear Bakody,

I just saw your question, sorry for the delay. About 7 years ago I discovered that I could get an adherent deposit on copper with a KI based bath. I had made about about two dozen successful plates up to full plate size but I ultimately abandoned the process as it was too time consuming, first in polishing copper successfully and then building up the layers of silver enough to create an acceptable surface. About two years of trial and error! The whole point of it was I was wanting to make full plates. My clad silver plates can only be made up to half plate size. These days the motivation has to be pretty strong for me to make a full plate.
The KI bath I made from scratch first by dissolving KI in silver nitrate solution. Diluting he solution would precipitate Silver Iodide. This I would wash with distilled water and dissolve in a strong solution of KI.
This is a very expensive bath requiring a lot of Potassium Iodide. After plating, rinsing the plate would precipitate silver iodide on the surface creating yellow stains. Making plates this way can be done but it sure takes a long time.
At the end of the day, at least for me, I can get good consistent quality with the clad silver plates with a reasonable amount of work. Probably about an hours total work for a new half plate if I galvanize it twice. I’ve been working with Mayall’s cyanide re-silvering formula for about a year when I wish to galvanize on top of clad. The clad plates work quite well without galvanizing, but for that extra touch I find the cyanide formula a little more convenient and consistent than my immersion plating thiosulfate galvanizing formula.
hope this helps

Mike Robinson

[Bakody]

Thank you for your answer, I was really waiting for it!
I can images that because you had to produce AgI the bath was expensive. When you used the KI based bath, after you polished the silver plate, is the yellow stains disappeared totally?

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

[Mike Robinson]

Dear Bakody,

when I plated thick, for example 5 microns, the surface would be a frosty white and required polishing to achieve a shine, often there would be pinhole voids, not through to copper but not an ideal surface. I resorted to plating several thinner layers to build up a smooth surface. The yellow stains are easily removed with polishing. Where I got into trouble was when I tried to put on a top-coat very thin, lightly sky blue, after hand buffing the stains would be gone as well but they would show up as tone variations in the image.

Mike Robinson

[Bakody]

Thank you! I will try to silver plate soon (1 or 2 month). I will post the result in here.

http://daginhun.blogspot.com/
 http://www.facebook.com/DagerrotipiaDaguerreotype

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